L’HOMME-VERTIGE is not a film about the city of Pointe-à-Pitre but rather a long drift through it, an exploration of its human landscape. It's not a film about life in Pointe-à-Pitre but about survival...I imagined this film as an attempt to express this suffering, which persists and also tells of the state of the world today It’s an attempt to reveal this social drift, this drift of the territory, by filming the voids, the states of contemplation, and the daily struggles. I wanted to show this city as a metaphor for the state of the entire island. It was the city of the people– of factory workers, of revolts crushed in blood, and of battles – but now it is nothing more than a ghost town haunted by bygone political and social utopias. What are the remains of history carried in the bodies?
Not knowing what to become or even how to live on this island and in this city, I decided to stop; I wanted to film the details, to show what is left, what is still resisting, and simply what "is". The film is a search, a desire to oppose chaos with contemplation. I trace my own exploration of the territory and record my encounters with these characters, who live there in another time and at a slower pace, one that aligns with the city's inertia. It’s a time that stretches, and no longer has the notion of the years that pass. A time of waiting, of repeated daily gestures, of the metamorphosis of the streets over the hours. Let their existence be remembered so that we remember that these men and women have existed. Ti Chal, one of the main characters, once said to me: "Observing the street is the best way to stay in touch with life.”
The slow disappearance of ourselves
As a child, when I came to Pointe-à-Pitre with my mother, I saw these intriguing characters who were part of the landscape. We called them names in Creole, and sometimes they disappeared. They were my first contact with strangeness and madness. I saw them escape the island without ever leaving.
One day, I left. I had to flee, absolutely. There weren't really any prospects here; it was France – “the metropolis” – or nothing. And then I went further. Seven years of absence, from one continent to another. During this long journey, I met Guadeloupeans like me, wandering the world without an anchor, without a country. The island inhabits us but we do not inhabit it. An island without contours that still dreams of being a country, an island exclusively defined by a center that is external to it. Because it is often when we leave that we realize to what extent our Frenchness is paradoxical and open to question. And then all these imagined and imaginary returns, because you can never stay too far away for too long. What does the lack of a country change inside of us?
I would come back home sometimes, and I would feel this sensation of inertia, of oppression in my chest, and the difficulty of moving on. Always the same problems: land contamination, incessant water cuts, hospitals in crisis, growing unemployment, the families in precarity, the aging of the population, land sold to foreigners, invasive and increasing tourismthe struggles with no achievements. I was there without really being there; I felt like a spectator. I was watching things from afar. I wondered if this stagnation had anything to do with the history of the island. How to belong to an island that does not belong to us.
How to live here? Deep down, we don't want to leave the island. It is the island that is slowly leaving us. We are silently witnessing our slow death. Staying in Guadeloupe is a constant fight against immobility. It is being strong enough to agree to endure the country and its contradictions. I stayed.
The[se individuals] became my anchor points, I listened to them, followed their footsteps and immersed myself in their gaze.
Certain places obsess me I keep retracing my steps to the same places – the alleys, the markets, the abandoned buildings, places that will no longer exist. And I wonder, if the city will take us down in its fall, what traces, and what memory will survive this great enterprise of destruction.
Because I see violence in the social misery that contaminates the city, which erodes even more the bodies ravaged by crack, the bent and thin bodies of the wanderers who no longer ask you for anything, lying on the sidewalks or in front of abandoned businesses. In resignation, as if we no longer hoped for anything. We became spectators, we have no say – we no longer matter to anyone, we just exist.
So, I want these voices to be heard. We must also remember these women and men. Heirs of this latent anger, neither militants nor resigned. They are seers anchored in a wavering city, holders of a memory buried in the folds of their silences or the meanders of their inner voices; these characters are suspended on the edge of the city’s abyss, on the edge of the chaos of the world. They became my anchor points, I listened to them, followed their footsteps and immersed myself in their gaze. Their vertigo is ours, the one that seizes us when we stop moving forward in the current that carries us away, when the mirages dissipate. They are constantly in the middle of chaos, challenging our vision of the world, summoning us in turn to finally take our place.
Malaury Eloi Paisley
